The Origins of Autocracy

Of course, the setting up of an aristocracy within an absolute mon­archy is a painful and contradictory historical process, inevitably fraught with numerous conflicts. Certainly, in the course of these con­flicts, the single leadership—as the Scandinavian experience, for ex­ample, shows—could base itself not only on the bureaucracy, but also on the city dwellers, the service landholders, and even on the peas­antry. The aristocracy in its turn could seek political allies in various social strata. The compromise between them could take various forms. However, what is important for us here is that both the single leadership and the aristocratic personnel were elements in a single system of absolute monarchy, and as a rule set themselves the goal not of destroying each other, but merely of finding an advantageous form of compromise. I say "as a rule," because when in the France of the late Bourbons, the kings in fact tried to rid themselves of the political interference of the aristocracy, the absolute monarchy, as Montes­quieu noted, began to degenerate into despotism. But, I repeat, as a rule the argument between absolute monarchy and aristocracy con­cerned the form of coexistence and not life or death—this is the essence of the matter. Nowhere in medieval Europe, except in Russia, had a "new class"

replaced the old elite, thus creating, instead of absolutism, a political structure which was unique at that time, the autocracy.

In other words, contrary to Kliuchevskii's premise, absolute mon­archy was

in principle compatible with aristocracy as a guarantor of the social limitations on power. And it was not absolutism but autoc­racy, therefore, which required the total replacement of an aristo­cratic governmental class by a system of universal service.

But if Kliuchevskii's premise was incorrect, his conclusions also be­came dubious. This applies to the idea that "the life of the Muscovite state even without Ivan would have been set up in the same way in which it was set up before him and after him,"[201] and that the Oprich­nina was a random and arbitrary historical accident, connected with the personal character of Tsar Ivan.

The connection of the Oprichnina with the Russian political tradi­tion is demonstrated very easily by Kliuchevskii's own analysis— which, alas, entirely contradicts his own conclusions. Does he not as­sert that "the sovereign, remaining faithful to the views of an appanage prince holding patrimonial properties, according to the ancient Russian law, treated them [the boyars] as his household servants with the title of bondsmen of the sovereign"? Does he not quite clearly formulate the historical character of the Oprichnina, saying: "In the Oprichnina, he [the tsar] felt at home—a real ancient Russian liege lord

among his serf- henchmen"? Therefore, not the tsar's personal character was the es­sence of the matter, but rather the ancient "tradition of the appanage prince holding patrimonial estates," which Ivan the Terrible in the course of the Oprichnina made universal.

It is another matter entirely—contrary to the opinion of the des­potists, who see nothing but this tradition of the patrimonial ap­panage prince in Russian political history—that it not only did not dominate in sixteenth-century Muscovy, but hewed a path for itself only at enormous cost and with a great many victims. The Oprichnina itself is proof of this. If the Muscovite kingdom of the sixteenth cen­tury in fact merely reproduced the characteristic features of the East­ern Roman Empire, as Toynbee postulates, why, for example, did the despot need a coup d'etat, renunciation of the throne, manifestos to the people, a division of the country into two parts, an agreement with the boyars and the clergy, mass terror, a second capital, and a parallel apparatus of administration? According to the account of contemporaries, the tsar returned to Moscow after the revolution quite grey at thirty-five years of age. A Byzantine autocrator would simply have compiled lists of proscriptions, and one fine night, as the saying goes, have taken his opponents from their beds with his bare hands. Why did Tsar Ivan behave differently? Why did he need a revolution in place of a "night of the long knives," if not in order to break up the existing order of the state, created by a different, com­peting absolutist tendency?